On 20 May 2014 16:22, David Benfell <benfell(a)parts-unknown.org> wrote:
Ian Malone writes:
> On 20 May 2014 04:50, David Benfell <benfell(a)parts-unknown.org> wrote:
>
>> But even
>> so, unless you have a specialized need for Pulseaudio, which apparently
>> may
>> include very high-end audiophile applications, removing it seems
>> generally
>> harmless.
>
>
> High end audiophile applications like having more than one sound
> source running at a time?
I'm sorry. I can't answer this adequately. It's what came up the last time I
saw this discussion.
Apparently, and I'm clearly not anywhere near enough of an audiophile to
understand what they were going on about, pulseaudio does make some sound
capabilities that matter a lot to musicians--which I think *did* include
mixing--and other people who really care about extremely high fidelity
sound. It was, for me, a jaw-dropping conversation that required me to
acknowledge that as much as I think I care about high quality sound, I was
completely out of my league.
I'd point you to the right list if I remembered which it was. And I think
it'll be hard to find via Google because usually discussions about
pulseaudio and its necessity devolve into flame wars.
That sounds more like Jack, where latency and multiple stream handling
is important. Neither Jack nor PA particularly help with high fidelity
sound, good hardware does that. (There is a slight factor in how
sample rate and depth conversion is handled.)
I was really referring to the fact in 'the bad old days' it was
necessary to halt or even shut-down one application that was playing
sound before another could. The normal response to this is 'but I only
listen to one thing at a time!'. Which is not really true if, for
example you want to have skype running but listen to music, or use
flash at all. There was a brief attempt to fix this with alsa dmix
settings, but it's pretty inflexible.
--
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk